


Glass

by Peach_oniisan



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Coma, Coping with illness, Despair, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Amputation, Rating will go up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 22:06:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4539153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peach_oniisan/pseuds/Peach_oniisan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi had heard stories like this, about men who survived wars only to starve on their pillow, trapped in dreams everlasting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glitzkrieg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitzkrieg/gifts).



Too fragile, they had concluded, hushed voices painting the commander in words made for flowers and glass. Too close to disease. Erwin’s wounds had begun to show signs of infection and they couldn’t risk moving him from his bed until the fever dropped and the swelling around his stitches settled.

Levi had insisted on being there for doctor visits. Quiet, he stood in a corner while unfamiliar hands pulled Erwin out of his clothes; peeled back the bandages to expose wet, festering skin; handled him in ways no one should have the right to. Erwin teetered on the edge of consciousness with no voice to protest, a body stripped of everything but its weakly beating heart. Levi could only look, pale and tight-lipped, over the back of a stranger who bound flesh back to bone and sewed his lover together with the frayed threads of his dignity.

No one dared question the corporal’s decision to stay in that room. Levi slept in a chair, dark jacket three sizes too big draped over his shoulders and shoes tucked under his seat. His deep-set eyes sunk even deeper with fatigue and those observant enough could tell he was staying awake too long. The oil burned in his lamp until the small hours of the night, while he sat and listened for fevered breaths and mutterings, for any little sound or sigh or whimper. 

Inside the four walls of Erwin’s bedroom everything stood in stillness and isolation. For all Levi knew, the world outside could be ending, and yet all that mattered was the lessening weight of Erwin’s hand inside his own. At his weakest, he kneeled next to the bed with his throat full of sand. He lifted the commander’s remaining fingers to his mouth and let his lips linger on each of them in turn, if only to make sure that life still pulsed beneath the clammy skin.

He didn’t dare touch Erwin when others could see. Didn’t dare stand too close to any reflective surface -windows and mirrors and the glassy eyes of subordinates- for fear that the sight of his own face in grief would break him. 

“In Sina they call me your dog.”

Half a year before, he had thrown that statement into an otherwise pleasant conversation. It carried no bitterness, no insult; only the bored resignation of apathy and his usual lack of amusement. Erwin had looked up from his book; blue eyes as calm as water on a spring day, but somehow unable to rise past the edge of his desk. His thumb hesitated between one page and another, while speckles of dust made a dance on the autumn light. The sunset cast a shadow across his face and Levi saw his heavy brows draw together behind a pair of reading glasses, until the paper rustled again and Erwin went back to reading.

“In Sina they say a lot of ignorant things.”

They did, but Levi didn’t mind being compared to dogs. As a child he had slept close to them for warmth, on nights when shelter was nowhere to be found and home remained a foreign word. He learned not to give them names, for their friendship could only last as long as their lives and in the Underground they were too valuable a resource to be left to wander. Dogs were hunted, eaten in anguish, but their affection was fierce; their loyalty fear-inducing. They surrendered their neck, not to a leash but to a caress. The wildest of them had a gaze full of stars and jaws that could rend the heavens.  

 _You are not an animal_ , Erwin had told him but Levi knew he was wrong. Like a creature lost, the small man guarded the bed, counting the passage of time on Erwin’s hollowing cheeks and the lemon flowers opening outside his window. After four days the fever was gone but the commander had yet to open his eyes.

Work piled up atop Erwin’s desk but Levi couldn’t bring himself to hold a quill. Not when the hand that had taught him to write was still rotting in a field. In a fit of frustration, he had tied all the closed envelopes with twine; letters and contracts and reports to be signed, bound and ready to be thrown into the fire. But the ghost of ink-stained fingers wrapped around his own gave him pause, and instead he sank next to the stove, defeated. The paper felt heavy on his lap, and on that day he came to understand the weight that never left his commander’s shoulders.

His childlike scratchings would never compare to Erwin’s well-bred cursive, but the same evening he sat at the desk regardless and signed his name till dawn.

_What if he never wakes up?_

Levi had heard stories like this, about men who survived wars only to starve on their pillow, trapped in dreams everlasting. An unspoken fear began to rise in his chest, and he hurried to chase it away, suddenly angry at his own lack of faith.

After five days the curtains swayed over a spring breeze, but the walls were growing warm with the scent of rot. He found it lingering on the sheets, a sweet-smelling blend of camphor and alcohol, pus and blood that refused to go away, even though linens were changed often and Levi laundered and bleached them himself.

He boiled water to sponge Erwin’s body in sleep, washed his own hands with lye soap until the skin was red and dry. The wound at the end of Erwin’s stump refused to heal. A herbal poultice was to be prepared and applied overnight, bandages changed three times a day.

Levi took care of it all behind a door perpetually locked, refusing all help unless it was forced on him. Those who knew the corporal would understand that his stubbornness was born of mourning, of guilt, but who was left with that kind of insight other than the man in the bed? He would draw the curtains to shield Erwin from pitying eyes, brush his blond hair back and away from his face whenever he was to be seen. To his colleagues and his subordinates -to the young recruits who looked up to him in awe and offered their hearts- he was still Commander Smith. None of them had a need for Erwin, his Erwin, lying still and colourless under his woollen blankets with one wing sawed off at the root.

Levi would turn the key in the lock without a greeting and look away while the doctor administered food in the only way an unconscious man could take it. The old medical manual recommended a blend of eggs and milk, chopped meat and sugar. Cod-liver oil in regular intervals, when and if available. Levi’s reading was slow and effortful, but he had still gone through the marked yellowing pages to ease his mind, only to leave more sullen than before. Pray, the doctor had told him. Pray that his will to live is strong, for in the middle of this famine the commander would have to go most days with nothing but salt and water to sustain him.

After six days Levi would stare at his own portion of bread, and the pot of nettle tea someone had kindly left behind the door, with no appetite for either. The food would stay untouched on the table, and he would watch it grow stale, his cheek resting where Erwin’s hand used to be.   

_What if he never wakes up?_

The cup cradled in his hands fell on the floor with a loud thud that echoed throughout the wooden boards. He sat up breathless and drenched in sweat, violently startled out of his half-consciousness. A sense of dread forced the air out of his lungs, cold and wild and shapeless.

“Captain, you need to sleep.” Petra’s voice rang in his ears, soft and clear as day, and a choked laughter came out of him because she had been dead for months. You couldn’t keep a man alive on prayers alone, she used to say. You need to sleep, you need to eat, and Levi hadn’t been doing either. He tried to move and realised his spine was beginning to take the shape of his chair.

Fully clothed in his shoes and crumpled shirt, he lifted himself off the floor and crawled into the bed. The feather mattress sank under his weight. With a sigh, he rested his head next to Erwin’s and slept for an entire day.

_Levi…_

No one had spoken his name since Erwin left on the last expedition. Due to myth and reputation, it took a certain amount of boldness to use it in front of him and most people only addressed him by rank -Lance Corporal, _Sir_ \- invariably followed by an ardent salute that got on his nerves. They had been taught to revere him and so they did, counting their steps and keeping their distance so as to never taint his prestige. After seven days, Levi slept wondering if they could read the signs of collapse on his face; if they noticed; if it was something they could even believe.

“Levi…”

Purple lids fluttered open and for several moments he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. A watery blue filtered through sunkissed lashes and he lifted a hand at the sound of his name, only to feel it spoken once more around the birdlike bones of his fingers and the chapped lips of a man who had almost lost his way home.

Erwin was awake.


End file.
